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EDUCATION
INSIDE: Three teachers on why so many educators feel frustration with their jobs or leave the eld. PAGES 30-31 Q&A with Michigan State University education policy professor Katharine Strunk. PAGE 30 ONLINE: UM trains teachers in medical school-like
residency. CRAINSDETROIT.COM/CRAINSFORUM
JUMPING-OFF POINT
’A sense of abandonment’: How teacher churn destabilizes schools, costs taxpayers and hurts Michigan’s most vulnerable students
BY KOBY LEVIN AND GABRIELLE LAMARR LEMEE
Idriss Saleh hasn’t forgotten his freshman year teachers at Universal Academy, but he’s not sure they remember him.
By the time his senior year began this fall, he had outlasted all seven of those teachers. Saleh worked hard to maintain a 3.9 GPA and applied to an ambitious list of colleges. But he worries that he isn’t ready for college coursework, thanks in part to an unrelenting drumbeat of teachers leaving his school.
Decades of research back up his concern. Frequent turnover at the front of the classroom takes a steep toll on student learning, especially in low-income communities where students most need stable schools.
e problem is especially profound in Michigan. Amid stagnant school funding and growing disillusionment among teachers, more than one-in-six educators left for another school or left the classroom entirely during the 2018-2019 school year, a higher rate than the national average. is isn’t for lack of well-documented solutions: better training and mentorship, stronger principals, and higher pay are just some of the policies that have been shown to increase teacher retention.
A Chalkbeat analysis of more than one million rows of teacher workforce data sheds new light on the extent of the teacher movement in Michigan, how many students are a ected, and the toll borne by students of color and students from low-income families.
In 2018-19, 71 percent of students in Michigan schools that lost at least 30 percent of their teachers were eco-
nomically disadvantaged, the analysis found. Black students accounted for 45 percent of enrollment in these schools, more than twice their share of statewide enrollment.
Many of those students attend school in Michigan’s cities, where hundreds of schools have high rates of turnover, according to a state database of turnover rates among classroom teachers. Charter schools, which are largely based in cities and enroll mostly students of color, have especially high turnover rates.
Universal Academy, which lost more than half of its teachers every year between 2015-16 and 2018-19, is just one example. A spokesman for the school said the turnover rate has since improved.
Charter schools made up roughly one-tenth of all schools in Michigan, but half of the Michigan schools with very high teacher turnover during the 2018-19 school year.
All told, one in 10 Michigan students attended a school that year with a high rate of turnover.
“It’s tragic,” said state Rep. Regina Weiss, D-Oak Park. “It’s not acceptable.”
Weiss left her job as a social studies teacher in Detroit after her election last fall.
“When I left in December the comments I would hear from the kids were, ‘all the teachers are leaving,’” she said. “ at’s their perspective. It’s almost like a sense of abandonment. And it’s detrimental for kids.”
Why do they leave?
Teachers chose a public service profession with a reputation for hard work and long hours. ey don’t typically leave the classroom on a whim.
But teachers typically don’t abandon their classrooms on a whim.
Pay dissatisfaction is perhaps the single most common reason teachers leave their jobs. National polls show that teachers feel they’re underpaid, and a strong majority of Americans — more than at any point since 2008 — believe they need a raise.
“From our perspective there are a number of things that can be done about teacher turnover, but a core way is to pay teachers what they deserve to be paid,” said David Hecker, president of the American Federation of Teachers Michigan.
Michigan teacher pay is slightly above the national average, though it tends to be lower in low-income communities, where many teachers leave for schools with better pay and more resources.
A widening pay gap between charter and district-run schools in Detroit has pushed many teachers to leave city charter schools for the local district, where starting teacher salaries are now among the highest in the region. In 2018-19, 6 percent of charter school teachers left for Detroit Public Schools Community District, compared to 1 percent of district teachers who left for charters, the Chalkbeat analysis shows.
Lamar Phillips is a band teacher in Detroit with a master’s degree who devotes long hours to his students. He left his last job, at Detroit Merit Charter Academy, because he didn’t feel his pay measured up to the hours he put in.
Phillips also was disillusioned, he said, because the school wasn’t providing enough funding for the band program or giving it a favorable slot on the school schedule.
He chose to move to the Detroit school district, which has sharply increased teacher salaries in recent years.
“You’re talking about four, ve, six, seven thousand dollars more, and there’s a union,” Phillips said.
Low pay, however, is far from the only reason teachers leave their classrooms.
Hecker pointed out that a lack of school funding a ects teachers in ways that aren’t captured in their paychecks. When schools have less money to spend on classroom aides and social workers, teachers get less help. ose issues were central to a national wave of teacher strikes in 2018.
Teachers’ working conditions are also crucial to their sense of success, which plays a big role in whether they leave classrooms or leave the profession altogether, studies have shown. Training quality, job security, and the condition of learning materials and school buildings all play key roles. In Detroit charter schools, school closures contribute to instability in the teaching workforce. Of the 538 teachers who left those schools in 2018-19, 60 did so because their schools closed.
Support from principals is a particularly important factor in teachers’ decisions to stay or go, numerous studies show.
Sean McCauley began his math teaching career at Old Redford Academy middle school, another Detroit charter. He eventually left because he didn’t feel supported by school leaders, who seldom stuck around long enough to build a working relationship.
McCauley can recall four principals who cycled through the school during his ve years there.
Teacher turnover at Old Redford was persistently high, too — of 20 classroom teachers who began the school year in 2015, including McCauley, only two were left by the fall of 2019, according to teacher certi cation data obtained by Chalkbeat.
Few teachers who stayed were experienced enough to mentor an early-career teacher like McCauley. A few years after he started teaching, he was asked to mentor newer teachers. at’s when he began looking for another job. He felt he was too new himself to be a mentor.
He now teaches at Berkshire Middle School, a traditional public school in Birmingham, which has a more stable teaching sta . e year after he left, Old Redford received two F’s from the state for student pro ciency and growth. e board of directors later hired a new superintendent and sta ng company, Midwest School Services, Inc. Superintendent Sabrina Claude McGahee said in an email that Old Redford can only a ord to pay teachers 80 percent of the regional average, and that it relies on “a positive climate and culture with support from administration [to] attract and retain highly quali ed talent.”
—Band teacher Lamar Phillips, on why he left Detroit Merit Charter Academy for the Detroit Public Schools Community District
NIC ANTAYA FOR CRAIN’S DETROIT BUSINESS
Detroit has some of the highest rates of teacher turnover and burnout in Michigan, an analysis of state data on the movement of teachers shows.
12% (352)
Were no longer teaching in Michigan
<1%
(7)
Taught at a nonDetroit charter school
1% (23)
Taught at a Detroit area charter school
2% (70)
Taught at a nonDetroit traditional school
11% (343)
Taught at a di erent Detroit traditional school
74% (2,234)
Stayed at the same Detroit traditional school
... in 2019
In charter schools in Detroit, nearly one-in- ve teachers who started out in a classroom in the fall of 2018 were no longer teaching in Michigan a year later, the Chalkbeat analysis shows.
A long-running problem. Will the pandemic make it worse?
18% (284)
Were no longer teaching in Michigan
4% (61)
Taught at a nonDetroit charter school
<1%
(9)
Taught at a di erent Detroit area charter school
5% (79)
Taught at a nonDetroit traditional school
6% (94)
Taught at a Detroit traditional school
67% (1,064)
Stayed at the same charter school
... in 2019
When the pandemic shuttered Michigan schools, some education leaders predicted teacher turnover would increase.
